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Given the reputation that SPD has so deservedly earned, I suspect that they will be cleaning up the emptied bags, dusting them for fingerprints, then adding them into a database to cross-reference for “known drug users” so as to add an additional strike if any of those people are arrested for some other crime.

@DrugMonkey #6 – Keep in mind that this is the same police department who created the whole concept of “free speech zones,” which they created for the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle. A police department that has locked up political activists in solitary confinement for months without charges for exercised their right to remain silent and refusing to rat out friends during a grand jury witch hunt. A police department whose thuggery, arrogance and institutionalized racism has gotten so bad that it was investigated by the FBI, and which, because of the findings, remains under federal scrutiny. A police department that, despite the federal scrutiny, remains very hostile when people pay attention to what they are doing.

It is not paranoia when there is a rational, evidence-based and well documented history to support your conclusions.

1. It shows that the Seattle Police Department created and was the first to implement an technique repugnant to very foundation of freedom, and did this so successfully that the technique has become very widespread in the United States; and

2. It shows a pattern of attitudes that stretches back more than a decade.

And did I mention that the SPD continues to be under federal scrutiny after the FBI established the SPD’s pattern of thuggery, arrogance and institutionalized racism?

@DrugMonkey #11 – You are thinking of Seattle Initiative 75 in 2003, which called on SPD to “make cases involving marijuana offenses, in which the marijuana was intended for adult personal use, the city’s lowest law enforcement priority” and instead focus on other crimes. Although it was approved by 58% of the city’s voters, it had no real effect: the initiative was a non-binding plebiscite rather than a change to municipal code, and pot busts had been a low priority since statewide initiative 692 legalized medical marijuana in 1998.

Since 2011, however, the federal government has been cracking down very, very hard on medical marijuana dispensaries in Washington, with municipal police forces — including SPD — seeming to take enthusiastic part in the raids, busts and prosecutions of stoners, whether legal or not.

This is hilarious and exactly the kind of culture that you find here in Seattle. Of course, recreational marijuana is now legal here, but it goes to show you just how relaxed and accepting the culture is in the state of Washington.